Tatoo your brand? Good idea or tacky?

Tattoo Your Real Estate Company Logo? Team Building Or Bad Branding?

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Chris Leo

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If you’ve been reading my blog posts long enough, you know that I have an opinion on just about everything. Today though, I’m kind of at a loss for words. I’m going to just leave this up to you guys to weigh in on, via the comments below.

What has me at a loss for words, you ask? A program which Rapid Realty NYC is running in it’s brokerage.

Based in Brooklyn, New York, Rapid has 62 locations from New Jersey to Boston, tipping the scales at almost 1,100 employees. The founder of the company, Anthony Lolli has instituted some programs employees can take part in that will net them a 15% raise.
His company-wide program allows people to get a 15 percent raise if they do charity work, produce certain benchmarks, mentor a new agent, or if they get inked with the company logo (which can be any size and put anywhere on the body).
Okay, charity work, hitting benchmarks and mentoring, I get. But a tattoo of the company logo? Really?

After reading the article about Lolli’s program, I had a broad range of knee jerk reactions:

• My first thought was, “Great. Just what the Real Estate Industry needs to make themselves look super professional”
• Then, I considered this: Tattoos are actually mainstream these days. People of all walks of life and all backgrounds have them. In fact, I could probably go one step further and say it is more unusual these days for someone to have no tattoos at all (For the record, I don’t have any. I like them, just don’t have any).
• Then it occurred to me that in my 15+ years of working in the Real Estate Industry, the only thing that I have found as a constant, is change. Agents change brokerages frequently. Tattoos are permanent. If you leave brokerages, do you remove it? Do you leave it on? What if at a listing appointment a prospective client asks you, “Well, if your company is the best and we should work with you, why do you have that other company’s logo tattooed on your body?”
So as you can see, today I am at a loss. But this is a good thing. Let’s get a conversation going. What do you think about Lolli’s program? Inspired? Tacky? Wacky? Great?